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Tiki Suite

Marc Laporte

Founded AvanTech.net in 1999

Offers tech services mostly to small and medium organizations

And a few larger ones

Over 200 projects in 15 years

Tiki Suite

Tiki Suite is a selection of Free / Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) server, web, mobile and desktop apps with a concerted effort for greater interoperability and security, which is aimed at small & medium-sized organizations.

The Tiki Suite is especially suited to decentralized and knowledge-centric organizations and offers the features that what 80% of the people use 80% of the time (collaboration, office productivity, publishing, etc.).

Other popular apps have a different model: small core + loads of functionality in 3rd party add-ons.

But...

No hunting around to find the best 3rd party module

No needing to re-install 3rd party modules at every upgrade, hoping they all still work!

Because, in Tiki, everything is built-in and developers collaborate on and extend features, instead of just cooperating around a core (when they are not just outright competing...). And upgrades are easy!

Do you have two wiki pages for the same thing? No. Why would it be so for features?

No dependency hell (needing to re-install 3rd party modules at every upgrade, hoping they all still work!)

No hunting around to find the best 3rd party module

But does bring challenges

Huge code base to maintain

Admin panels with hundreds of features for a total of over 1200 settings/options! (we had to add a search!)

Learning curve: 1200+ pages of documentation

What should be sensible defaults?

More about complexity and files

Tiki 7.1 contains 11348 files and it's the FLOSS Web application with the most built-in features. About half the code in Tiki is maintained by the Tiki community and the other half is re-using code from external libraries like Smarty, Zend Framework, jQuery, etc.

So say we maintain about 6000 files. Sounds like quite a bit, but let's put this into perspective:

Joomla! has 9463 "extensions"

Drupal has 15948 "modules"

WordPress has 19382 "plugins"

Tiki covers the vast majority of features that these 3 systems offer via the thousands of extensions. So just about any project you could do with Joomla!, WordPress or Drupal, you could also do it with Tiki. Yet, they have more extensions to maintain than we have files! (and since they can't possibly maintain them all, it leads to dead-end extensions and disappointed end-users).

profiles.tiki.org

Instead of having thousands of extensions, we collaborate on the code base, and can make very specific apps thanks to profiles.

Value of a free source project

Beyond code: the community and the experience

Combining the different features, producing new benefits never imagined by the authors

How to share this knowledge?

Profiles to configure your Tiki

On wiki pages (collaborative, version history, etc.)

Can be used not just at install, but at any time and can be combined

Not just for settings, but also for data

Since there is no extra code, can be designed for very specific, long tail uses

We can have hundreds of profiles for an out-of-the-box experience, with a single code-base!

Tiki NIH Syndrome?

"Not Invented Here (NIH) is a term used to describe persistent social, corporate or institutional culture that avoids using or buying already existing products, research or knowledge because of their external origins. It is normally used in a pejorative sense, and may be considered an anti-pattern." Source: Wikipedia

Half of the code in Tiki comes from other projects! Tiki includes code from over 60 external libraries, including:

How much is it "worth"?

"Beyond just development time, COCOMO is meant to include the design, specification drafting, reviewing and management overhead that goes along with producing quality software."

Yet, the Tiki Software Community Association (TSCA) has no employees

Tiki doesn't depend on any funding from any company, foundation, government or anyone. It thrives thanks to the community.

Why this evolution?

So things are good, why change?

We need friendly software on the server and on the client computer and mobile device to avoid dealing with so many permutations and be able to develop advanced features and tight integration. Ex.: We have a Tiki chat feature, but we can't do presence.

Overlap & interoperability & the Trend to suites

Best of breed vs. suites vs. feature bloat

While Ted Nelson coined "Intertwingularity" to express the "complexity of interrelations in human knowledge", it's the same problem for software. There will always be overlap.

Apple controls both the hardware and the software which make it much simpler (drivers, UI, etc.)

Every app claims interoperability (ex.: via open standards)

It's very hard! Even within apps of a same publisher!

Because of Zawinksi's law ("Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." ), intertwingularity and the progressive move to Web Applications, more & more apps and SaaS will offer "everything".

"It's best to do one thing really, really well." –Google

Google started just with search. And now?

What is status of Tiki Suite?

The good

Each component is fantastic, and the future is bright

All risky / major / strategic components have been selected, and they all fit well together, with minimal overlap

The bad

It's still a manual process to assemble all the parts of the Suite (we are working on this)

Some less critical components (like Desktop virtualization) still need to be picked (but there are many good options)

The ugly

Some components don't yet interoperate well even though they should (It proves the relevance of this project!)

Black Duck Open Hub

ClearOS

Similar to CentOS but with slick, integrated UI and tons of features for a distributed organization. Can be on premise or hosted. ClearCenter offers paid services (ex.: remote backups, domain names, etc.) and hardware (ClearBOX)

Desktop apps / Virtual desktops

Access a virtual desktop (Any OS) via RDP or VNC, which has both software and files.

Can be with VirtualBox or KVM

BackupPC can be used to backup from client PCs to the ClearOS server

Kaltura video platform

Full-featured platform

Recording from webcam

Handles transcoding

HTML5 player

SaaS available.

Integrates with Tiki (SSO)

Piwik

PHP/MySQL Web analytics

Easy to integrate, nice feature set, nice UI.

There is a mobile client

Elasticsearch

By default, Tiki uses MySQL, but if/when your site has high performance requirements, you can easily replace with ElasticSearch

Analytics

Faceted search

Natural Language Processing (More Like This, etc.)

Super fast & scalable

Easy to deploy

Already integrated with Tiki

Also see Kibana, Elasticsearch's data visualization engine

Syncthing

Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it's transmitted over the Internet.
Source: http://syncthing.net/

Efficient sync between Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux and Android

Bootstrap GUI

Goal is to use for offline sync of File Galleries (developers or sponsors needed!)

How to participate

To participate, simply create an account on tiki.org and start participating. This site is a wiki. If you need/prefer to contact someone in private (ex.: media inquiry), please write to marclaporte at this domain name.

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